Agent of No One

Farfarello liked the straightjacket. He had been told, quite frequently (and usually by Nagi) that he was a freak for doing so, but he did. Okay, so he usually hated being put into it at first – seeing as they only brought it out after he’d been found in a church – but once he calmed down it was quite soothing. Especially when he’d been upside down for about five minutes, and the all the blood in his body was pooling in his head. It ached in a pleasant way. What he didn’t like, however was when Schuldig took the opportunity to regale him with stories of the redhead’s adventures among the unsuspecting Japanese population while he was tied up and unable to run away or stab him. (The latter being a preference, which on reflection was probably why Schuldig only babbled at him while he was in the straightjacket.) It didn’t help that Schuldig was his most loquacious while high on one thing or another, and thus his ramblings often made little to no sense. This night, however, the telepath had been mostly sober when entering Farfarello’s room in the wee hours of the morning. He’d proceeded to become less and less so, however, due to the crate of Guinness he’d brought with him. “Right, so we get to this restaurant, right?” Schuldig was saying, gesticulating with his can of beer. “And he obviously couldn’t afford it without telling Daddy what he was doing, so I dragged him saying I’d pay for the meal. It was one of those high-class fancy places where you get to pick your fish and then they kill it and cook it for you. Appealed to me.” While listening with half an ear, Farfarello carefully stored away the idea of picking something to eat while it was still alive. Cannibalism was generally frowned on by the Church, so it would be extremely fitting for him to practise it on one of their priests – but most of them were more blubber than good flesh, so careful selection was a must. He might have been a knife-wielding psychopath on a crusade against God, but that didn’t mean he had to eat poorly because of it. “So anyway, we sit down, and he wants to fuck me so bad he can hardly sit still. Most of it wasn’t even me! I just fucking love it when they do it to themselves. Anyway, I pick out my fish – can’t remember what it was, just made sure it had a really distinctive pattern on the skin, and told them I wanted it grilled, and served with the skin on and undamaged. Gave the cook such a headache, it was fucking priceless.” An empty can rolled into Farfarello’s line of eyesight, crumpled from where Schuldig had squeezed it once he was finished. He amused himself with working out how to kill a person with the most mess using the razor-sharp edge left at the lip of the can. “But yeah, back to the guy. He’s squirming in his seat, and I’m working him around in circles – one minute he thinks I’m about to blow him at the table, the next he wonders if he’s even going to get a goodnight kiss, and all the time he’s got this fucking hard-on and he can’t do shit about it. He goes off to the toilet once to take care of it, and once he’s back in his seat I’ve got him hard again in less than five minutes. That took some pushing, though – little bastard didn’t have much stamina. Thought about making him come in his trousers at the table, but I’d got something better planned. Maybe next time.” Occasionally, it occurred to Farfarello to feel sorry for Schuldig’s victims. The feeling never lasted long. The men and women Schuldig picked were almost universally in the prime of life, happy, well-adjusted, well-off financially (if not rich) – and left utterly broken once he was done with them. That was the telepath’s special talent, of course – not just getting into their minds, but within seconds zooming in on the one thing that would shatter them beyond repair. Farfarello would have thought of his teammate as God’s agent in misery, but for the fact that Schuldig fucked people over because God fucked him over. He wouldn’t admit it, of course. But Farfarello knew the reason. “So anyway, I’ve got him so wound up he’s half-convinced he’s in love, because fuck knows nobody else did it for him like this. We’ve got our food ordered, and he’s spending every second petrified that I’m just going to up and go, and then the food arrives. I go off to the bathroom, and then I spend fucking ages making him want my fish more than anything. And I won’t notice if he takes a bite, right? Little fucking keeps dithering, but I make him take a bite eventually, and then it’s so easy to convince him that no one will notice if he takes another one. And then a bit more. And a bit more, and finally he’s eaten my entire fish by the time I get back to the table.” Farfarello sometimes wondered where Schuldig got his ideas from. Making a person eat his fish wasn’t quite the sort of mind-breaking activity he imagined being as devastating as Schuldig’s plans always were – but then there was a reason he wasn’t the team’s telepath. “So I get back there, and look at my plate, then look at him, and then I grab him by the arm and drag him out of the fucking restaurant. Making sure nobody notices us leaving, of course. He’s fucking terrified, being the innocent that he is, so I throw him up against the car and kiss the hell out of him before dragging him off again. So he’s wondering what the hell’s set me off like this, and thinking he’s going to have to eat my fish a lot more often. “But yeah, so eventually we get to a hotel, and get a room. He’s hard as a rock and about to go off any second, so I shove a cock ring on him, and would you believe the little bastard actually didn’t know what it was? Fucking hell, what are they teaching them these days? Anyway, I stripped him off, shoved him face down, tied him to the headboard, and fucked him ’til he screamed. Didn’t let him come, though. Untied him, rolled him over, and tied him back up – legs too, so he couldn’t move. Gagged him. Then I punched him in the gut, said ‘You ate my fish, bastard’, and left him there.” Schuldig took a long swig from his can. “The hotel people found him about an hour ago, and would’ve left him there – they get a lot of people who play games at that one – but the time’d run out on the room. Poor baby had to call his parents to pick him up, then explain to them what he was doing at a gay love hotel without any clothes on. He’s now a fucking pariah in his own home, the bill from the restaurant is going to appear on their doorstep with a cop tomorrow morning, he got tied up, fucked, humiliated, he still hasn’t come, and he’s fucking ruined for anyone else, but I’m still not done with him.” Farfarello wondered precisely what there was left to do to do the poor boy who had incurred Schuldig’s wrath. “What’s left to do? I’ll tell you what’s left to do. He’s lost his family, his self-respect, and his ‘love’, but he’s still got his friends, right? There’s one in particular he relies on more than anyone else in the world, but a couple of days down the line when his parents are letting him speak to people again, he’ll call up this friend, invite her over, and guess who’ll be coming with her? It won’t take much to persuade the friend that we’ve been dating for months, and that she knew all about our date. If it doesn’t seem too implausible, I’ll try and go with the line that it was all her idea in the first place.” Schuldig gave Farfarello a satisfied grin. “She’ll get a big helping of guilt about something she didn’t do, and his life will be completely and totally ruined. I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes off and kills himself after that, and since he’s not a long-term toy, I don’t particularly care.” Farfarello said nothing. It wasn’t the most original plot that Schuldig had come up with, but then most people weren’t particularly original in their fears; the complete and total destruction of the nice, comfortable life you have around you always caused great pain to the person involved. It was thoughts like that that occasionally made Farfarello wonder if Schuldig was actually an agent of God. But then he looked at Weiss, and thought that Schuldig couldn’t be, because Weiss still believed and Schuldig didn’t. Schuldig was an agent of no one but himself – himself, and perhaps the principle that misery loves company. “You know what?” Schuldig said, leaning back against the wall with his eyes fixed on something only he could see. “I don’t even really like fish.”

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